Metafiction and Ecuadorian Graphic Novel: the Case of El ejército de los tiburones martillo (2019) by Fabián Patinho

Abstract

Fabián Patinho’s El ejército de los tiburones martillo (2019) (An Army of Hammerhead Sharks) consists of metafictional critique, a mode of novel writing that has surfaced often in Ecuadorian Letters in the last decade. The article holds that Patinho’s text works as a means of legitimizing the emergent field of the Ecuadorian Graphic Novel; that is to say, it presumes to establish a double origin as befits this hybrid medium. On the one hand, the graphic aspects of the text seek validation in the mythic mural painting produced by Camilo Egas for the New York World Fair of 1940. The literary side of things seeks support in the Spanish translation done by Francisco Alexander of Walt Whitman´s Leaves of Grass. This revisionist history of Ecuadorian literary an art history works to establish a new version and vision of Ecuadorian High Culture that can be formulated as a reading pact (that includes a gendered reading) between a new and skeptical, group of readers and a new authorial, self-referential sensibility.